The Impact of the "Hall of Fame" Raid Achievements in Battle for Azeroth

\rRecent Battle for Azeroth Alpha builds have altered how guilds receive prestigious Feats of Strength for kills. in Battle for Azeroth, instead of receiving a Feat of Strength for the Realm First Kill, players in the top 100 guilds per faction will receive a special Feat of Strength and title. In light of those changes, using data graciously provided by Raider.io, we will analyze how would those changes impact rewards for the current tier and the possible motivation behind them.\r\r\rBuild 26310 - Initial Achievement inclusion datamining\rBuild 26433 - Title addition datamining\r\r\rIntroduction\rIn every competition, there is an extra desire to improve in order to beat other competitors, either by achieving more points or finishing it before them. That is the essence of any competition. Raids have been part of World of Warcraft since its inception, with and being available ever since launch, in November 2004, as a motivation to reach the level cap. There has always been competition between the best guilds in the world in order to see who was able to clear content first. \r\rUntil now, most of the effort of tracking this race was done by the community, with many different tools and hubs appearing as the years pass by. With the advent of Achievements in Wrath of the Lich King, Realm First achievements with special titles were added, like , being the first time Blizzard provided in-game recognition to top-performing PvE guilds. \r\rMany tiers of raids have come and gone since, with Realm First achievements moving to a guild achievement in Cataclysm, requirements slightly tweaked, and title rewards removed, but overall the system remained the same. But it is all likely about to change in Battle for Azeroth.\r\rA recent Battle for Azeroth build added two new Guild Achievements:\r\r\t\r\t\r\rBoth achievements also award the title . Currently, there are no "Realm First" achievements added for G'hunn, which lead us to believe that the "Hall of Fame" will be the new system of recognition for the best Guilds in Battle for Azeroth. Many different questions can be asked about this system change, especially regarding the different faction achievements. \r\rPvP Reward Changes\rThis split was likely inspired by the same change that happened with PvP end-of-season rewards in Legion:\r\r\r'Tis The Season\rLegion is also bringing several changes to how PvP seasons, as well as their rewards, will work. Over the years, we've seen the high-end PvP community tend to flock to one faction over the other, even if it's not the faction they'd prefer. Racial balance is an important part of that, but we also think many players tend to simply choose the faction where they feel the best players are.\r\rSo, in Legion, we'll be handing out end-of-season PvP awards separately to the top percentages of players in each faction, instead of in relation to the overall player base. That means that, even if you believe one faction to have an advantage over the other, you can still play the one you want to, without having to worry about losing your shot at Gladiator.\r\r\rAs described above, all PvP rating-based awards were given based on your faction's ratings, instead of overall as previously done. With throughput mostly removed from racials and professions, the PvP population was supposed to balance itself out eventually, but Blizzard noticed that wasn't the case as WoD progressed. Faction imbalance became a bigger issue as Warlords progressed, with Blizzard eventually introducing Mercenary Mode in an attempt to reduce queue times for the lower pop faction.\rThere were many different reasons for this behavior, mostly due to the previous imbalance created by racials, which just ended up increasing in a herd-esque effect. In order to counter this behavior, Blizzard decided to then change the PvP rating-based rewards to be faction-specific. The results of this change can be seen in the reduction of rating differences throughout Legion Seasons Gladiator \/ Hero cutting ratings:\r\r\r\rThe chart shows the difference between Alliance and Horde ratings throughout Legion seasons, with positive values representing higher ratings on the Alliance side and negative values higher ratings for Horde players. The disparity between ratings was clear during Season 1, which exemplifies the faction imbalance present before Legion. However, as seasons progressed, the rating differences started to reduce, implying a balance between players in both factions. These results were probably the main reasoning behind Blizzard modifying the raiding Realm First system in BFA.\r\rWith that in mind, using data graciously provided by Raider.io, we will look into what impact the Hall of Fame system would have had on progression.\r\rNote: The eventual balance of the tier would likely be different had this system been in place since the beginning of it. This analysis was done only to exemplify what such a change can mean to top guilds.\r\rCurrent State\r\rThe data used for this article was gathered April 1st, 2018, when there were 550 guilds that had earned . At this point in time, it is common knowledge that there are more Horde than Alliance guilds among the top guilds worldwide. As the chart shows below, at the time, there were 385 Horde guilds versus only 165 Alliance guilds that had killed Argus, or 2.33 Horde guilds for every Alliance one.\r\r\r\rThis imbalance isn't something new in the PvE scene, as we can observe it only getting worse over the tiers. As there are more Horde guilds, there are more advantages to join a Horde guild than an Alliance one and you end up having more Alliance players getting recruited to Horde. Now with more Horde players on their server, they decide to stay on the same faction when leaving or creating new guilds due to the ease of recruiting, as the majority of the best players are on Horde, which leads to further increase the imbalance.\r\r\r\r\rHall of Fame Impact\r\rWith that imbalance in mind, we arrive at the main point of discussion: What would've happened if the Hall of Fame achievements were implemented for Antorus? Well, for starters, with 550 kills already completed, there would be no more achievements to be claimed at this point, however, there are still plenty realms with still available. (There are realms with still available!) Below you can see the distribution of the realms that haven't killed Argus, per region.\r\r\r\r\tUSEUKRTWTotal\r\tTotal Realms119122910260\r\tRealm First Available49287288\r\r\r\r\rThe realm count considers connected realms as one, as they share the criteria for getting Realm First achievements. One impact of the implementation of the Hall of Fame is that the number of achievements awarded will be reduced, from 260 Realm Firsts worldwide to 200 Hall of Fame achievements worldwide.\r\rIn Antorus, the odds of a top guild receiving Hall of Fame on Horde are way lower than on Alliance side, for instance, all Alliance guilds that have killed Argus before March, 7th would have earned that achievement, however, Horde guilds, in order to qualify for their Hall of Fame, would've had to kill it February, 5th, a little over 4 lockouts earlier. That difference is also shown in the ranks, the 100th Horde guild to kill Argus was rank 125 overall, while the top 100th Alliance guild was 373rd overall, which is an immense difference. \r\r\r Looking closely at the rankings from the guilds, while every Horde guild in the Hall of Fame had their kill in the top 200, 49 out of the 100 Alliance Hall of Fame guilds killed Argus after that same mark, which is almost half of the guilds that would receive the achievement in Antorus. The huge discrepancy between top Alliance and Horde guilds is what Blizzard intends to reduce with the introduction of Hall of Fame, hoping that the same effects that happened with the top PvP population occur with the top Raiding population.\r\rThere are guilds that will warmly welcome the changes from Hall of Fame. 96 of the 200 guilds that would receive Hall of Fame didn't receive Realm First, because they are located in realms with higher ranked guilds. 55 out of 100 Hall of Fame Alliance guilds were not the first guild in their realms to kill Argus, and 41 out of 100 Horde guilds. \rThere are, however, guilds that were the first to kill Argus in their realm but wouldn't receive the Hall of Fame achievement. As of the data collection date, 174 out of 260 worldwide realms had their Realm First achievement claimed. If the Hall of Fame criteria was applied, however, only 104 of those guilds would receive it, meaning 70 of those guilds that received a Realm First achievement aren't in the top 100 rank for their faction, being 52 of those Horde guilds and 18 Alliance guilds.\r\rSocial Impact\r\rAs seen when looking at the changes that the separate awards brought to the PVP scene, the Hall of Fame changes will likely accomplish the objective to improve the balancing between Alliance and Horde guilds. However there might be a downside to that change. Lower population realms might be affected heavily by this change as it removes one of the benefits of being in them--smaller competition. \r\rHaving a worldwide ladder achievement will make larger realms even more popular, as they now offer not only a broader pool of players for recruiting, which could be fixed by lifting the Mythic requirement of being from the same realm. The worldwide ladder requirement also means guilds no longer have the downside of competing against more-progressed guilds on one server as only your relative performance will matter for you to obtain Hall of Fame and not where your guild is located.\r\rWith the Hall of Fame and the eventual arrival of communities, I wouldn't be surprised to have Mythic no longer realm-locked at the start of the tier, which would be a healthy change for smaller realms.\rWhat are your thoughts on the Hall of Fame system? Let us know in the comments!

Commentaires

Commentaire de pmkaboo

Commentaire de wowpallias

on 2018-04-15T09:00:55-05:00

One can only hope for cross-realm Mythic from the 'git go'. That would help smaller mythic guilds so much.

Commentaire de galinhoo

on 2018-04-15T09:08:30-05:00

This alone don't mean too much, unless they start giving the same level of rewards from PvP (maybe give glad mount to the top percentage of PvE too?). Also flat out balancing the racials.\r\rYou can't compare directly the change on pvp and pve, considering that for pvp you can just change your character or you and 2 friends, while on pve you need 20~25 players to swap. Rewards still seems too low for it to work

Commentaire de Ramatar

on 2018-04-15T09:12:32-05:00

So basically "Pay for Achievements" since the top 100 guilds are always going to be those whose members run expensive gaming computers. Might just as well tell the player base that Guild Achievements are no longer for Guilds of friends but only for guilds run like corporations!

Commentaire de jordanclock

on 2018-04-15T09:26:37-05:00

So basically "Pay for Achievements" since the top 100 guilds are always going to be those whose members run expensive gaming computers. Might just as well tell the player base that Guild Achievements are no longer for Guilds of friends but only for guilds run like corporations!\r\rHow does having a high end gaming PC affect getting these achievements? Even a rather modest computer runs WoW quite smoothly.

Commentaire de stym

on 2018-04-15T09:38:19-05:00

This alone don't mean too much, unless they start giving the same level of rewards from PvP (maybe give glad mount to the top percentage of PvE too?). Also flat out balancing the racials.\r\rYou can't compare directly the change on pvp and pve, considering that for pvp you can just change your character or you and 2 friends, while on pve you need 20~25 players to swap. Rewards still seems too low for it to work\r\rTwo very good points there. Especially for a top guild, switching factions would require a substantial amount of money from all of the players on the Mythic roster, especially since they are sometimes required to maintain several alts at the highest level (which might be mitigated by the loot rule changes, wait and see).\r\rThe racials are a stickier issue. Top players obviously favor the on-demand ones because of their ability to use them more effectively, making the flat increase racials more common in the Alliance less desirable. I'm looking at you, Trolls. And Orcs. And Blood Elves. And Tauren.\rThe difficulty here is also that racials have different impacts on PvE and PvP. The human racial is really hard to beat in PvP but mostly useless in a raid setting. How do you balance one aspect of the game without negatively impacting the other one?\r\rIt is good that they are looking into this, but it might be a little too late. Runaway processes need to be addressed early.

Commentaire de omedon666

on 2018-04-15T09:49:06-05:00

Honestly, when they talked about addressing the faction imbalance in high end raiding, I didn't think about the HoF setup... I immediately went to cross faction grouping, and "communities."

"Communities," as in the WoW-side grouping mechanic, are not meant to replace faction-locked "guilds," the grouping we've always had, but are apparently there to be "your tuesday night mythic group," and "your friday night raiding PUG," as in you join many of them and they are less formal.

So riddle me this: What better way to make communities attractive for forming semi-formal raiding groups than to shift raid achievements from "guild centric" to "community centric?" There is nothing stopping a super serious raiding guild from just making a community consisting of all their guildies, they don't miss out on anything...

But if either the story or just the "bring friends together" element of WoW\/Blizzard motivates just... a flip of a switch sometime in BFA (you know, the "faction identity" expansion, where one can "be horde" and know what that means while also working with the alliance) to make communities cross-faction...

I mean I can't think of a better, more direct way to address racials, imbalances in factions and the whole deal in raiding than making every race available to every raiding group... every "community." You double the recruitment pool for "super srs" raiding, and you know... it has a zillion other benefits if we apply it to other PVE content types.

Obviously this can't happen for the G'Huun tier, we already know that set of achievements are split...

But the dungeon finder wasn't a launch day feature, neither was the raid finder. In their respective expansions, they were patch point X systems.

We'll see. Fingers crossed and all. :)

Commentaire de Nexsa

on 2018-04-15T09:51:37-05:00

This alone don't mean too much, unless they start giving the same level of rewards from PvP (maybe give glad mount to the top percentage of PvE too?). Also flat out balancing the racials.\r\rYou can't compare directly the change on pvp and pve, considering that for pvp you can just change your character or you and 2 friends, while on pve you need 20~25 players to swap. Rewards still seems too low for it to work\r\rTwo very good points there. Especially for a top guild, switching factions would require a substantial amount of money from all of the players on the Mythic roster, especially since they are sometimes required to maintain several alts at the highest level (which might be mitigated by the loot rule changes, wait and see).\r\rThe racials are a stickier issue. Top players obviously favor the on-demand ones because of their ability to use them more effectively, making the flat increase racials more common in the Alliance less desirable. I'm looking at you, Trolls. And Orcs. And Blood Elves. And Tauren.\rThe difficulty here is also that racials have different impacts on PvE and PvP. The human racial is really hard to beat in PvP but mostly useless in a raid setting. How do you balance one aspect of the game without negatively impacting the other one?\r\rIt is good that they are looking into this, but it might be a little too late. Runaway processes need to be addressed early.\r\r\rMaybe if they could disable racials in Mythic raiding and other competitive things, they wouldn't have to nerf the fun out of them. Blizz, just do it already. Then nobody will have to raid or switch factions based on a racial.

Commentaire de Kurias

on 2018-04-15T09:58:49-05:00

This seems like an interesting experiment but I wonder why it matters in the first place. It seems that at best roughly 10% or less of total subscribers are running mythic raids and fewer than that competitively. Why should it matter what color flag they choose to worship? I understand you want PvP to be balanced because it is nice, even necessary, to have a team to play against but raiding is just PvE. I play several hours a day most days and don\u2019t even notice the existence of raiders, I doubt if there were fewer of them that it would make a difference to me.

Commentaire de w3maniak

on 2018-04-15T10:07:07-05:00

Afraid that without more balancing of racials (nerfing Orc and Troll "extra trinkets" pretty much necessary) the problem won't be solved.

Commentaire de Aarkan

on 2018-04-15T10:07:52-05:00

This alone don't mean too much, unless they start giving the same level of rewards from PvP (maybe give glad mount to the top percentage of PvE too?). Also flat out balancing the racials.\r\rYou can't compare directly the change on pvp and pve, considering that for pvp you can just change your character or you and 2 friends, while on pve you need 20~25 players to swap. Rewards still seems too low for it to work\r\rTwo very good points there. Especially for a top guild, switching factions would require a substantial amount of money from all of the players on the Mythic roster, especially since they are sometimes required to maintain several alts at the highest level (which might be mitigated by the loot rule changes, wait and see).\r\rThe racials are a stickier issue. Top players obviously favor the on-demand ones because of their ability to use them more effectively, making the flat increase racials more common in the Alliance less desirable. I'm looking at you, Trolls. And Orcs. And Blood Elves. And Tauren.\rThe difficulty here is also that racials have different impacts on PvE and PvP. The human racial is really hard to beat in PvP but mostly useless in a raid setting. How do you balance one aspect of the game without negatively impacting the other one?\r\rIt is good that they are looking into this, but it might be a little too late. Runaway processes need to be addressed early.\r\rPaid game services can now be bought with gold that can be bank rolled by the guild.

Commentaire de xragusx

on 2018-04-15T10:45:23-05:00

I think you guys are overthinking this one...

Commentaire de Narrae

on 2018-04-15T11:10:30-05:00

So basically "Pay for Achievements" since the top 100 guilds are always going to be those whose members run expensive gaming computers. What ? How ? My brain just exploded ... Is that some kind of conspiracy theory ?

Commentaire de prator

on 2018-04-15T11:28:45-05:00

Yea, the graphic show that it more horde thar alliance, and in the next expansion blizzard want chance pvp for more rewards, for the horde maybe. Have to make something for balance the alliance and the horde. The best part is that it was made. But had to make the void elf like the night elf in appearance. And the balance was undone again.

Commentaire de Cosmicwind

on 2018-04-15T11:43:45-05:00

If Mythic would become cross-realm would the achievements and guild progression become connected to communities? Will the amount of guild members you need for progression to count be the same for communities as well? Will there be a time restriction for progression to count for a new community member as there is for realm changing? I would be excited for communities to just replace guilds. As a raid leader it has been difficult to recruit a set 20 on my medium pop realm. The majority of raiders I have recruited had to realm change, but I would have no issues maintaining a 20m roster if raiders could be cross realm. But I also like the realm competitiveness, and if cross realm raiding happens with communities then there would no longer be a realm race, and instead of being in the top 20 Alliance guild on realm you are now 10k in world lol. Being able to push for a top 20 spot on realm is more exciting then 10k world, that is for those of us who are not hardcore in hours played. But these were just a few of my thoughts, I look forward to seeing how things change, and I hope those changes are for the best.

Commentaire de Swordart21

on 2018-04-15T11:53:49-05:00

They REMOVED REALM FIRST ACHIEVEMENTS AND NOW ADDING THIS what a $%^&show.

Commentaire de sinangelus

on 2018-04-15T11:56:16-05:00

This seems like an interesting experiment but I wonder why it matters in the first place. It seems that at best roughly 10% or less of total subscribers are running mythic raids and fewer than that competitively. Why should it matter what color flag they choose to worship? Because I'm sick and tired of constant recruitment hurdles an 11\/11 mythic alliance guild faces. Checking wowprogress for suitable players and constantly seeing current alliance players type in their description "going horde for BFA", "looking for horde guild", "let's be honest alli is dead" and so forth, and don't let me started on horde players, it's basically "alliance guilds - no thanks". If Blizzard refuses to remove faction barriers, then let us at least play the faction we like without facing the label of being "the worse faction". During Antorus my guild already lost 3 players so they can "go horde", mostly due to mythic+ community. \r\rPersonally I don't even think a measly title will fix it. \r\rBut if nothing is done slowly the trickle down effect will drown alliance raiding. First it will kill top 10, then top 50, then top 100, then top 300 and so on and so on. \r\rThe cost of transferring multiple characters is so atrocious that if the "horde or die" isn't fixed, wow is gonna be too expensive hobby to maintain for anyone who plays alliance, unless they abandon their alts or abandon the idea of raiding mythic at any level that can actually finish the instance in a reasonable timeframe (not talking about the guilds that dip toes into mythic but never reach cutting edge unless maybe on prepatch). \r\rThe current tuning of Antorus + no nerfs + cutting content drought length to minimum means very few guilds in the world scale killed it early enough to be able to get mythic Argus mounts to 100% of their raiders. And what other motivation is there to raid mythic if not for cutting edge and mount, since definitely not for gear in the world of titanforge. \r\rLower population realms might be affected heavily by this change as it removes one of the benefits of being in them--smaller competition. Just merge them already, no point having dead realms, it's an MMO after all. We didn't get new merges ("connected realms") since MOP, that was years ago. In the outdoor world everything is CRZ-ed anyway, so no benefit for "rare camping" or anything, there are only downsides of low pop realms that is empty AH, too few guilds and trade market controlled by monopolists and price gougers. \r\rSince the login queue issues got resolved by the sharding tech and most servers have high potential capacity to endure busy launch days, there's absolutely no downside to having much fewer realms with much higher pops. Also there's no problem with naming clash since each character retains realm name as a "surname" of sorts. \r\rWe're way overdue for more connections \/ merges.

Commentaire de Swordart21

on 2018-04-15T11:57:20-05:00

THESE GUYS who wish for cross realm mythic show me a random 20 guys which will show up via PUG and do progress not gonna happend stop dreaming and stop playing alone and find a proper guild btw you know cross realm mythic show me your cutting edge you managed to get by having mythic cross-realm guys.ALLIANCE 100=300 HORDE LUL what a awesome spot PLAYING ALLIANCE LULFOR all ALLIANCE NA just go HORDE EU and you will know what is mythic raiding.Will tell you secret guys blaming racials reason as HORDE especially in EU is so good joke they were better, then they nerfed out of them and we all stayed as HORDE not reason going to Alliance at all when there are for sure not good players as we can see.You would rather used your own legs to move instead of wheelchair, and achievement showing alliance 100 would be nice joke at Horde side.

Commentaire de omedon666

on 2018-04-15T12:57:04-05:00

THESE GUYS who wish for cross realm mythic show me a random 20 guys which will show up via PUG and do progress not gonna happend stop dreaming and stop playing alone and find a proper guild btw you know cross realm mythic show me your cutting edge you managed to get by having mythic cross-realm guys.ALLIANCE 100=300 HORDE LUL what a awesome spot PLAYING ALLIANCE LULFOR all ALLIANCE NA just go HORDE EU and you will know what is mythic raiding.Will tell you secret guys blaming racials reason as HORDE especially EU is so good is joke they were then they nerfed out of them and we all stayed as HORDE not reason going to Alliance at all when there are for sure not good players as we can see you would rather used your own legs to move instead of wheelchair, and achievement showing alliance 100 would be nice joke at Horde side.